Bringing Visibility Into Marketing To Organize Everything With Dree Ziegler From Fulton Fish Market [AMP 148]

Unexpected projects derail your marketing process or work management. It happens. How do you prepare or respond to such stress? Do you find a way to complete your work and meet deadlines? Marketing teams are always expected to do more with less.  Today’s guest is Dree Ziegler, director of digital marketing at Fulton Fish Market. Every marketer has similar tactics, but they’re all talking to different audiences and pitching different services and products. Dree brings a fresh perspective and describes how she created a process using CoSchedule to stay organized and constantly communicate. 
By A CTIONABLEMARKETINGPODCAST

Some of the highlights of the show include:
  • Not a Can of Corn: Fulton Fish Market in New York City follows the same way of doing things since the beginning of time
  • Nothin’ Fishy about Dree’s Marketing Experience: Digital and eCommerce marketing and technology strategy that moved to merchant side of business
  • Remote Headquarters: Dree manages a dispersed team of people in a number of places who are in contact with all the people in the market on a daily basis
  • Challenges: Dree understands importance of visibility across the team, staying organized, and constant communication
  • Gone Fishin’: Fultonfishmarket.com’s goal is to bring that fresh seafood experience to people, wherever they may live
  • It’s not the same: Fresh fish from a grocery store is fish caught months ago, frozen, kept in a warehouse, trucked across country, thawed, and put on display
  • Fulton Fish Market features about 40 vendors that bring fresh fish that’s sent overnight and delivered to your doorstep
  • Fulton Fish Market’s Documenting Strategy for Marketing Plan: 
    • Set high-level goals for team that’s still growing
    • Update Website to improve consumer experience
    • Put baseline digital marketing tools in place to plan daily tasks
    • Draft and create day-to-day marketing plan and content
  • Fish-on-the-Fly Campaigns: Ordering and buying fish that’s only good for so long; purchasing department buys what’s fresh in the market and expected to sell
  • Project Plan: Visual waterfall of tasks and who’s doing what; monitor team’s tasks, pickup slack, work collaboratively, and deliver what’s promised 
  • Fulton Fish Market’s next frontier is doing the things that people should be doing vs. automation and machine learning (ML) tools
  • Marinating on Future of Digital Marketing: No experience needed, continue to learn, differentiate yourself, and stay hungry
If you liked today’s show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Content Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.

Bringing Visibility Into Marketing To Organize Everything With Dree Ziegler From Fulton Fish Market

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Transcript:

Eric: There’s one consistency when it comes to marketing process or work management, is that there will be inconsistencies. There will always be that pop-up project that comes out of nowhere that completely derails your marketing calendar, your project, system of process you have. There will always be that fire drill that other departments throws over the wall, into your lap, and now you’re like, “Okay, what do I do with this?” That is just the facts of life, folks. The bigger question is, how do you respond to such a situation? How do you prepare for that type of situation? Because you know what, it’s the teams that continue to complete work and cross their deadlines. Those are the marketing teams that are successful. Those are the marketing teams that we try to model ourselves after. Because we’re always expected to do more with less. That’s just the reality we live in. This is going to be the topic of the Actionable Marketing Podcast episode this week. I have the perfect guest. Her name is Dree Ziegler. She is the Director of Digital Marketing at Fulton Fish Market. Dree does an amazing job. She actually is faced with regular fire drills that she has had to create a process for in the management and she actually uses CoSchedule to do so. It’s really fun to hear from a customer of ours and how she’s managed to do this. Guess what? She’s remote from headquarters. Her entire team that she manages is remote, so she’s doing this completely virtually. The importance of having visibility across the entire team and the importance of staying organized and constant communication is paramount in order to be able to manage those types of situations. It is a fantastic episode. You know what? One of the especially bittersweet for me, this is my last episode as the host of the Actionable Marketing Podcast. I’ve taken in a new opportunity and I have enjoyed every moment with the guest that I’ve had in the show, and coming to you week in and week out, and I will dearly miss you. So let’s enjoy this last conversation. The conversation is going to be a great one with Dree. Can’t wait to introduce you to her. Alright ladies and gentlemen, for the last time for me anyway, buckle up! It’s time to get AMPed! Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Actionable Marketing Podcast. If you can respond, give a big warm welcome to Dree Ziegler. She is the Director of Digital Marketing at Fulton Fish Market. Dree, welcome to the Actionable Marketing Podcast. Dree: Thanks for having me. It’s great. Eric: Absolutely. It’s great to have you on the show. Every once in a while we ask some of our CoSchedule customers to share their stories, so I appreciate you. Not only of course being a customer, but also coming on the podcast and to share a peak behind the curtain of what’s going on at the Marketing Department there at Fulton Fish Market. Thanks for taking time to doing so. Dree: No problem. We love doing stuff like this. Eric: Good. I know we were talking a little bit before we went live here. You’re personally based out of Michigan, but your office is out in New York and you’ve got team members everywhere. Is that right? Dree: That’s exactly it. The Fulton Fish Market is about a 200 year old fish market in New York City and my team is actually in a number of places that are not there. I have a couple of people in Chicago, some people in Vermont and of course, we’re in contact with all of the people in the market on a daily basis. We’re pretty scattered, actually, 100% remote for people that are working on the digital marketing side. Eric: I can’t wait to dive into more of that because that just adds a whole different dynamic when it comes to being productive, communicating as a team, and staying organized. I’m sure there’s tons of those things that definitely had been a challenge in doing so and I’m sure you found a great way to alleviate those challengers. You know what Dree? I want my audience as I always do here, to get to know a little bit about you, like what’s your marketing journey, how do you always love fish, how did you end up at Fulton Fish Market? It’s such a cool business, by the way, so I wouldn’t mind if you take a minute or two to try and talk about what Fulton Fish Market is. I know you guys are doing some really cool groundbreaking stuff there. Just let our listeners know a little bit about you. Dree: Sure. I have been doing digital marketing and specifically ecommerce marketing and technology strategy for about a decade now. My back end is actually on the agency side. I was working in our base ecommerce agency for the last 10 years and I also have my own small agency. I did a digital on the side. Most of those, I’ve been working there for a long time and decided I needed to be on the merchant side for a while just to get a different taste of it, a different experience. In January, I started with fultonfishmarket.com. It’s an entirely different experience. The business itself, the fish business is eons old, and they’ve been doing it the same way since the beginning of time. The fish market itself still has this old iconic New York feel to it. And our startup fultonfishmarket.com really, our goal is to bring that experience to people wherever they may live. Whether it’s a restaurant in Austin or it’s a family in New York or in New Jersey. We want to deliver that freshly good experience to their doorstep quickly. That’s the background of fultonfishmarket.com and why that it was an exciting opportunity because there are so many unique challenges that come with delivering freshly-hooded, one of my bosses, she likes to say, “It’s not a can of corn.” It’s very different to do what we’re doing every day, how to market it, how to get things out the door, and it’s highly fashion becomes really important. Eric: That’s awesome. It seems like it would be an industry that will be right for disruption. Like you said, this old tradition of fish market and how do we disrupt that in a sense that you guys are doing some really cool things. I saw a really cool article, I think Anya who finance. I know you guys have been getting some great publicity on some of the disruptive things you’ve been doing. What I need to know is can I get fresh fish in Fargo North Dakota because that’s where I live. I’m originally from the East Coast in Massachusetts. I moved here when I was young and I love fresh seafood. As you can imagine, it’s not readily available here in North Dakota. Can I get it sent to my table? Dree: You can. That’s what we’re trying to do. We understand that even with a grocery store, if you go to buy fresh fish at the grocery store, you’re talking about fish has been frozen, that was maybe caught six months ago, but frozen and kept in a warehouse, and then trucked across the country. Then it’s thawed and put in the refrigeration section of your grocery store. It’s not the same. What we’re doing is we’re taking fish that comes in to the Fulton Fish Market, which has almost 40 different vendors that are bringing in fresh fish, fresh catch of the day, and we are taking it, getting self-fulfilling orders overnight that came in that day, so you’re getting basically the freshest possible fish and it’s delivered to your doorstep within overnight shipping. It’s made for people in North Dakota actually. That’s what we’re trying to do. Eric: Yes! I love that. I could spend the whole episode talking about this unique business model. I love being able to bring in different marketers who are touching different industries. Lately, just a couple of weeks ago, I had someone who’s doing agricultural construction industry. Now we’re talking about the fish market. The reality for all of our listeners is every marketer maybe employing some similar tactics, but they’re all talking to different types of audiences, pitching in different type of services and products, and this is really cool. You’ll bring some really good fresh perspective. To dive into our conversation and just to unpack a little bit about how does digital marketing work at the Fulton Fish Market. As the director there, you obviously are orchestrating a lot of things on the digital side of your business. A lot of the stuff in this series—we’re talking about makeshift marketing—is really understanding how marketing leaders like yourself approach certain things. Begin with documenting strategy. How do you develop this really strong marketing plan? Or do you set in this strategy for the year and then try to implement some agile methodologies based on what’s working, what’s not working? How fluid are you? Unpack what your process looks like which people can learn by hearing how other organizations are approaching marketing, planning, and marketing strategy. Our research says that people who document their strategy are 300% plus more likely to be successful. There’s huge value in doing so. How does it work for you, Dree? What is your practice? Dree: We started out the year setting some high-level goals for our team. Our team is still growing. The company itself is roughly about 40 people. They’ve got some digital foundations, but really, one of our strategies this year was to update our website and bring our actual consumer website experience at par like what people see on a daily basis. We’re still working through that; that was a big initiative for this year. This involves putting some baseline digital marketing tools in place. Making sure we are using some organizational tool to plan our daily task, making sure we had all of our basics covered on social media, paid, retargeting, all of those things that just need to be the baseline of your digital marketing, and putting them in place. Those are our major initiatives for the year. We’re still working through if we’ve done all of those things. We’re still working through the website step as well. With that said, your day-to-day marketing thing that you’re putting out still needs to get drafted and created. Even though we have big initiatives that are overarching over the year, we still have to put out a recipe every week that’s like, “Here’s a new recipe. This is the fish that you need with that recipe.” We’re doing a combination of big initiatives that overarch the year as well as daily small marketing tidbits that go out on our social media and through our emails. We also have another unique thing that is specific to selling seafood online. For us, when we order, we buy fish, it’s only good for so long. There’s no real plan always as to what our purchasing department is going to buy. So it’s what’s fresh in the market and if we think we can sell it. Sometimes, we sell it to the restaurants. If we don’t, that becomes something that the marketing team takes on as how can we sell this on the consumer side. We’ve used CoSchedule as a tool to develop what we call fish-on-the-fly marketing projects. What that means is that on Tuesday morning, I’ll get on the phone with the sales team and I’ll talk to them about what they’ve sold, what’s in the market, and what we’ve got in inventory that we feel like we might have too much of, for instance. I will create a project for us that basically, in a couple of hours, we put together a full campaign around whatever that species is, its email, all of our social channels, it’s probably a promotional code, it’s some paid campaigns. And everybody knows that when they see a fish-on-the-fly campaign come into their dashboard, it is probably the most important thing that they’re going to do that day and they need to do it right away. We’re doing a little bit of high-level strategic overarching thing and some really tactical day-to-day, agile marketing stuff as well. Eric: I was going to say that is a really unique case scenario that I just love. My next question is about fire drills. Your “fire drill” is literally like, “Hey, we’ve got to run an inventory this particular fish we couldn’t sell. Marketing team, you need to push this hard so that we can offer and still get out money back on what we’ve purchased,” right? Dree: Exactly. Eric: And you never know when that’s going to come. I’m curious. Do you get an email from your purchasing team? How does that information flow? Do you have a template that you use, “Okay, now we’ve got this fish. We’ve got two days.” What does that look like? I’m really curious, and how fast your team can move to do that? Dree: It’s within a couple of hours actually. My team is pretty small. There’s four of us technically right now. We basically get inventory updates. The market is open from 1:00 AM to 7:00 AM every day. That’s when they sell all the fish or when they fulfil all the orders. I won’t know until that morning when we have that sales call at 8:00 AM, what we have and what’s the thing that we should probably be pushing. We bring in a special salmon from Alaska a couple of times a year and when we bring it in, it’s an expensive fish, it’s what we call the fancy salmon. We want to sell a fancy salmon. It’s really nice, you don’t want it to go back because it’s a shame. When we get on that call at 8:00 AM and I find out that we have two Copper River salmons that we haven’t sold yet—that’s probably 16 portions—we should probably go and do the fish-on-the-fly. It is a template and CoSchedule actually made this pretty easy because the template exits. I go in there, I put some details about what the species is, and what the product page is that we want to sell it. Then my team knows that when that comes through and that’s due today, that they’re going to do it first when they get in at 9:00 AM. It’s disruptive for our day, but our goal is to actually work ahead a couple of weeks in terms of that day to day stuff so that if you do get something like it’s not totally disruptive to what we’re doing for that day. You know what I mean? Eric: Yeah. There are two things. One, I need to try some fancy salmon at some point in my life, and two, I’m thinking about ourselves here at CoSchedule. We can head’s up the new product features coming months in advance. The idea of having something like, “Boom! Hit in the morning! Boom! We got a fire two hours!” I can just understand the importance of being able to move so quickly and to have that process set up. I love it that CoSchedule’s working for you in order to do that. It’s really eye-opening to know that there are teams that probably, maybe it’s not fish, it could be something else like it’s an emergency PR thing that someone else is doing. Being able to do that is just part of being a marketer. Marketers are asked to do more in less time is what it feels like nowadays. Do you have any advice then? How have you been able to stay so nimble? Again, if you’re a listener and this is just a part of your life and it’s just a part of your role, maybe for a lot of other marketers, it feels more like a nuisance like, “Dang it! They’re asking for something again!” Totally throw me. What advice would you have about how to work that into your existing workload and what works best? Dree: The fish thing is clearly unique, but we also get those one-off requests from other departments that are like, “Oh hey, I’m going to go speak at this conference tomorrow. Can you touch up my deck?” because we have the creative team in our department. Or, “Can you put out some social media about some event that we’re doing that no one has told us that.” We have the same problems that any other marketing team has, but one of the things that I do is, like I said, working ahead. We try to work ahead. At least the skeleton of what we’re going to do in terms of day-to-day social email and those tactical things where you have to go get a copy and assets made. We try to work ahead on that stuff as much as possible. We’re honestly not farther than probably 3–4 weeks ahead most of the time, and most of that stuff is not all finished. It’s all in some state of disarray until the week when it’s ready to go out. But we have most of the pieces together, so that if we know disruptions do happen, we’re ready for them. I know that that‘s hard to work ahead when something’s not immediately in front of you, but it helped us when we’ve had these things come up. The other thing is just monitoring my team’s task and making sure all of our tasks that we have have deadlines. There’s nothing out there that’s really whenever you get to it. If we have overdue things, I either take a look at the project and maybe we need to push this out and get some more time, collectively, or I may try to tackle it myself. Some things I’ll just pick out and say, “Well, my team wasn’t getting to this because she’s got too much other stuff that’s on her plate with fire drill and I’ll try to do this.” It’s about just working collaboratively like that as a team and picking up each other’s slack a little bit. With that said, I couldn’t do it without the people that I have that really care about what we’re doing. That’s probably the biggest piece of it. They care just as much as I do if something gets done on time and they are accountable to each other because they like each other, so they make sure they deliver the things that they promised on time because they don’t want to disappoint their teammates. Eric: Dree is just a lot of fun. I hope you’re enjoying our dialogue when it comes to staying organized, handling fire drills, and making sure that you are top of your process, to make sure you’re crushing your goals and your deadlines upon conversation. A lot of us struggle with makeshift marketing. We’re using multiple tools, we were disconnected from our other departments, we don’t even know what the designers, or [...], or social media marketers are doing, so how do we combat that. We’re doing that here at CoSchedule with our new CoSchedule marketing suite. If you want to learn more about how you can overcome makeshift marketing. I want you to go at coschedule.com/transform-modern-marketing. That’s right, we are transforming the way marketers can work. Again, that’s coschedule.com/transform-modern-marketing to learn more and hear from a video from our co-founders about what we’ve created and how we are helping marketers do more with less. Good stuff, let’s get back to our conversation with Dree. The research that we found is the more organized marketers are the more successful marketers. That’s based on research and that’s something that marketers don’t think about. This is not part of their lives until they feel that pain of like, “Where is this project out? When is it done? Who is working on it? Where is it at?” Having that, and you talked about the importance of knowing where projects are at, knowing who’s working on them, and you talked about how to make sure you were hitting those deadlines. It always sucks when you’re the marketer saying, “Oh, I didn’t hit this deadline. We have to push this back.” It happens here and there, but the more happens, the less confidence they have in your team, they hate it, and you want to make sure that you’re living up to that to show your value. What do you find as the best way to do that? What process have you done to keep your team on track? What kind of communication are you doing? Are you leveraging any certain process to do that? Dree: For our larger projects, we’re actually building a step [...] website now, a subscription site. That’s actually almost entirely the marketing team and using some of my ecommerce previous life experiences to put that all together. We actually built a real project plan and I know that sounds like, “Well, of course you did,” but we’re not always doing that stuff at our company. We built a project plan so that you can visually see, start to finish, the waterfall of all the tasks that needs to get done and then who owns what. Then we took all those tasks and put them into their own project in CoSchedule with the date assigned to each person, so everybody has that, knows their dates, and they’re so following it on their dashboard, but there’s a very visual way of seeing, start to finish, the whole project in a spreadsheet. I know that that’s not always how you want to do things, but we are still using CoSchedule that master task, a daily dashboard for all of our team members. That’s been helpful and we are constantly talking to each other. During this I actually turned off Slack and I feel the anxiety of the people in Chicago. Eric: “Where’s Dree? Where’s Dree? Why isn’t she answering?” Yeah. Dree: We are constantly talking. We touch base on a full team phone call at least a week, if not a couple of times when we’re doing these larger initiatives, and I just meet everybody on the call. We have the VP of Marketing on the call, sometimes the CEO joins us. That’s just to share all of the things we’re working on and the exciting pieces of different puzzles that are starting to come together. Eric: That has to be paramount because when we first started our conversation, you talked about you’re in Michigan, your team’s in Chicago, you get more people here, you’re headquartered in New York, you’re everywhere. You don’t have the satisfaction of just cruising by and asking someone something right at their desk or even just relying on Slack. We use Slack, too, and I love Slack, but Slack suck when it comes to search for a conversation thing. The threads are  endless. Having that game plan is super important, especially with that remote type of team where you need that one source of truth, where you can go and feel like, “Okay, here’s our game plan. Here’s how we’re going to stay organized.” I appreciate you sharing that. That’s awesome advice like mapping out your projects, like the waterfall. Whether that’s in a spreadsheet, or a napkin, or however you want to do that, thinking through that, and you talked about those fire drills like, “Okay, what are some things that could come up? What would it look like for us in order to execute that?” I’m sure when you were playing this fish, what is it? Fish fighters? What do you call it again? Dree: We call it fish-on-the-fly, but I do like fish fighter. Eric: It’s fish-on-the-fly that’s probably more positive than fish fighter—or fish fries, we like to [...] here in North Dakota. I love that because I’m sure you found a method to the madness to be able to say, “Okay, when this happens, here is our process,” and everyone can be able to take that, like, “What are some things that could come up that would disrupt our well-oiled machine of our marketing process and all of a sudden the wrench has been thrown, how could we handle that?” There’s tons of good learning in what you’re doing there. I appreciate you sharing there. One thing is always interesting. We did a survey where we talked to over 3000 marketers. Everyone’s feeling this increase in anxiety. I don’t know if it’s self-applied or if it’s from the top of the leadership, the CEO, the CMO saying things like, “I need to do more, but I feel like I have less and less time to do it.” That means more and more is getting thrown on marketing’s plate. And then like, “Oh by the way, you can’t hire any more people. You just got to get more efficient with your process.” Are you feeling that same kind of pressure? Maybe this is a great time to talk about your team as a digital marketing department. Are there other departments that are part of overall marketing? How do you work together and how do you share that responsibility of what is being asked and demanded of marketing nowadays? Dree: My team works with IT a bit and I have the connecting piece with the VP of marketing. We work together on other marketing initiatives that are more print, more advertising-y. My team, in terms of what we’re doing and feeling that we need to get more done, our technology and our automation of our technology is super key for us. We’re not even there yet, but we’ve made some big steps in getting there. We used to send out an email when it struck us or we were going to have a sale, we send out an email. Now, we’re segmenting and using those automation tools for email that let your tool decide if they’re going to send an email to a customer and if that customer is maybe in the correct target audience to get that email at that time. But we’re still just using some basic automation tools. Where our next frontier for that is some kind of machine learning tools that are doing some of that and we’re doing the things that people should be doing. We’re doing creative and understanding how humans operate and understanding more about strategy as opposed to we need to copy and make another email and send it [...], that kind of thing. We’re not quite at that machine learning stage yet, but we’re definitely getting to the part where CoSchedule has all the automation of social and that’s been huge for us because we just plan it. We used to have someone who would create a spreadsheet of all of our social messages for the week, she get it approved, then she’d go make them and post them. Some of them would get scheduled, but not all the platforms let you do that through the platform itself. We’ve automated a ton of things which allows us to work ahead and then when people disrupt the flow, for whatever they need we're able to be more agile and supportive of what they need. The thing that we’re going to do today, that day is already done. Eric: That’s awesome. Out of curiosity, you talked about email, what email platform are you using right now and are you looking at and working out an automation platform currently? Dree: We are just using MailChimp right now, and we’re not even using a MailChimp integration. We’re on the Magento ecommerce platform. We’re actually still on Magento 1. MailChimp actually do a lot of automation things that are cool and will actually insert content based on pages that your users have visited and all of that  complex stuff you’ve been set up to automate that thing, so you’re not just blasting everybody on your list every time you think of sending a sale email. We are still working through getting that done, but it’s a big push for me because we keep getting asked to do more with less. If you’re automating things, that things are just happening on their own, you can be more with less. You can do more valuable things with the people that you have as opposed to having them copying and pasting email and copy. Eric: I love to hear that. That’s a challenge for all marketers to figure out where can I insert technology to make those things easier so that I can use my time more wisely and get more done with the same amount of people or in the same amount of time. It’s just fun to hear where you’re at with that. I have to ask you about measuring marketing success. How are you determining what is successful? Do you have any challenges showing value of what your team is producing? Again, you have a VP that you all report up to. What have you found as your biggest indicators of success and how you go about saying, “Hey, look at my team is doing. We’re doing awesome things here.” Do you find that a challenge or have you found a way to show the value that your team brings? Dree: Our company as a whole is very big on reporting. One of the things we like to focus on is that yes, we are a fish company, but we’re actually more of a technology company that we just happen to sell fish. Our company wants to see reports all the time. They want to see SnapChats of how things are going. So we’ve developed, actually using Google Data Studio and plugins with that, some automated reports where we can show them a SnapChat of the week with  three or four high-level details of how it compares to that week before and the previous week. We’re also doing month-to-month and year-over-year reporting and that happens on a monthly basis. We have meetings with the leadership team to go over that stuff. We’re looking at everything from revenue and transactions to new customers, we’re looking at engagement of our social media, we’re looking at how our different channels are picked fairing, like email marketing versus our paid ads, like what’s bringing in more revenue. We’re looking at all of those things and we’re actually tracking on the different things that we’re doing on a week-by-week basis and how that impacts what’s coming through in the report, how it impacts the bottom line of our revenue and transactions. We’re using Google Data Studio and have developed some reports that our leadership team really likes and then we add on some analysis of what’s happened and what we actually did and the tactics we took to get those numbers. Eric: Cool. I love that. I’m always curious. That’s one of the most interesting questions is where are you getting your data from? What are you measuring? And how are you able to easily package it up and make it presentable to leadership? You’re right. Marketing is this more of a thing. It’s constantly being scrutinized more than ever on what’s working, what’s not working, and budget getting pulled. If anything, being accountable is extremely important. It sounds like you’ve got a good process in place which is always fun to hear. I couldn’t let you off the call without asking maybe some of your own personal career growth and development. It’s always fascinating we learn so much as our career progresses and it sounds like you’re in the thick of your career, took a brand new challenge there at the fish market, learned tons, and have built upon a good career so far. Now that where you’re at, what was one thing that you would wish you would have known when you began your career that you know now. Has anything stand out to you as like, “If I just would’ve known that, I would have been so much more successful so much sooner”? Dree: Yeah. I originally had a journalism and theater degree. Right after graduating from college, I started out as a reporter in a small town in California. I loved writing, I loved the work, but it was the digital stuff. When I went and moved out from that small town to San Diego, I got a job doing SEO and they taught me some stuff. I was a little nervous at the time of making that transition. One of the things I learned early on that was helpful for me was there’s nothing on the web that you can’t go figure out and solve yourself. Not having a degree in Computer Science. I took a half a semester Desktop Publishing class in college which is hilarious now. If you put in the time and you want to learn something, especially when it comes to digital things right now, ecommerce, all of those things are available to you on the internet. I didn’t have experience in it, I was able to forge the path that I have just based on trying things and breaking things, too, in the process. That would be probably one of the biggest pieces of advice I could give. Eric: I love that. That’s very sound advice. Stay hungry. If you need to know something just go learn it. There's a ton of resources out there to move where you want your career to grow. Good advice, I love that. I have to end with this question as I like to do. If you could step into my shoes as a host, what would you have asked yourself that I didn’t? Is there something that I should have asked you and I just forgot? Dree: Maybe where is digital marketing going in the future? That was the only thing I could think of we weren’t covering in terms of where Fulton Fish Market is doing on a daily basis. But I’m not sure I even have a great answer to that. Eric: I wish you would have asked me, but I’m actually glad you didn’t. Dree: It’s a hard question. Eric: Do you have any thoughts on that. At least maybe even in your market, what are the things that you feel like as a drug to digital marketing that you want to stay? You talked about learning new things. This works perfectly. What do you feel is the next thing that you need to stay up to speed on in order to make sure you’re on the bleeding edge of your role, in doing the best job you can for your company? Dree: There’s two ways to look at this. Digital marketing, web things in general, and ecommerce are going to get both easier and harder. You could spend a weekend, set up a Shopify store, and it’ll look pretty good actually, and you basically don’t have to have a ton of technical experience to do that. There are going to be people that are doing those easy things and then the people that are going to be rising above are the people that are going to understand the bigger concepts, the harder concepts, that analytics, the technical details behind those pieces of software. What I’m saying is it’ll be easier to get in the door and it’ll be harder to rise above as the market gets more crowded with things like that. I don’t know, that was just something I was marinating on today. Eric: That’s interesting. You’re right. Technology 3make things certainly easier. I thought the barrier of entry will be a lot, but you’re right because everyone will be doing it then though so then you got to find a way to stand out and create your differentiator to make yourself. Dree: Exactly, and how do you tell that story in a way that’s different. Not only that, but how do you do it in a way that excites people. That just requires a little bit more knowledge and maybe even just a better understanding of how people work in chop.  Eric: Yeah. Our job is never done as a marketer. That’s one of the reasons I love being in marketing is things are changing, technology is changing. Wonderful, impactful insight. I appreciate you sharing that, Dree,. and a lot of fondness to talk, to learn about your perspective, how you run your team, your processes, I appreciate you just really being candid and sharing some of that. Coming on the show has been fun! Dree: Of course. Anytime. Eric: My wife hates seafood, but I love seafood, so I’m going to find a way. I’m going to go out to Fulton Fish Market, I’m going to order something just sweet and get something delivered just so I can experience what it’s like here. Where can our listeners, if they happen to be curious, if they’re a fresh fish lover, where they can go to learn about Fulton? Dree: We have fultonfishmarket.com. It’s  our splash site. If you’re a restaurant owner, you can go there and you’ll get to chef.fultonfishmarket.com. If you want something delivered to your door as a retail consumer, just go to shop.fultonfishmarket.com and you can basically browse from there. We have the largest assortment of seafood online from what I understand. Eric: Awesome! Fancy salmon here I come! Dree: Absolutely, get some. Eric: Thanks so much Dree. I appreciate you coming to the show. Thanks so much for being a CoSchedule user and customer. I actually appreciate that as well. We love your business, and love to hear that it’s working for you and thanks for sharing some of that on the call today. With that, good luck. I hope there’s no fish fighters [...], but I know you’re equipped to handle when they come up. Take care out of the rest of the day, Dree. Dree: Thanks so much.
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